Anti­semitism has been a tan­gi­ble and, to vary­ing degrees, vio­lent pres­ence in my life since at least third grade, which would have been in 1970 or so, when John W – it’s amaz­ing that I remem­ber his name – hav­ing learned the day before that I was Jew­ish, came up to me in the play­ground while we were choos­ing sides for dodge­ball and said, “My father told me I’m not allowed to play with Jews.” I can’t recall whether or not I was per­mit­ted to be part of the game that day, but I can see very clearly the one and only fist­fight I have ever had, which hap­pened later that year. I don’t know why John B and I ended up in the mid­dle of the school­yard cir­cle of boys push­ing us towards each other, try­ing to get one of us to throw the first punch, but I do know that John W was not the only voice I heard reas­sur­ing John that I was “only a Jew” and there­fore “weak and easy to take.” In the end, the first and only punch was mine. I landed one right on John’s chin and he started bleed­ing and the sight of his blood fright­ened us all into run­ning wher­ever it was that we ran to. I was scared because I thought I’d really hurt him, but I found out later I’d only bro­ken a scab on his face. For the next cou­ple of years at least, no one called me a “weak Jew” again.

Next came the pen­nies. Still in third grade, my class­mates started throw­ing pen­nies at me in the school­yard. At the time, I did not know the anti­se­mitic canard of the cheap Jew, and so I did not at first under­stand why they thought it was so funny when I picked the pen­nies up. Since I would often end up with as much as twenty cents – an amount that meant some­thing to a third grader back then – I laughed at them for being so stu­pid that they were giv­ing me free money; I wasn’t even curi­ous about why they were also laugh­ing at me. Even­tu­ally, some­one explained to me just what the pen­nies were sup­posed to sig­nify – I wish I could remem­ber who it was – but I con­tin­ued pick­ing them up any­way, since it still seemed to me that my class­mates were the ones mak­ing idiots of them­selves. Then, in fifth grade – which means peo­ple had been throw­ing pen­nies on and off for two years – some­one started one day to throw pen­nies at me in the class­room; some­one else actu­ally handed me an entire roll of pen­nies; and then a group started chant­ing “Jew! Jew! Jew! Jew!” My teacher stood by and did noth­ing, and even after he’d calmed the class down and got us all back in our seats, he did noth­ing to acknowl­edge the anti­se­mitic nature of what had just hap­pened. And I was one of his favorite students!

Then there was the music teacher, who made a point of embar­rass­ing me in front of the entire class for not know­ing a ref­er­ence in a Christ­mas song – “Don’t you Jews know anything?” – and who was mor­ti­fied when I asked if we could learn to sing a Chanuka song, and who once almost refused to let me go the fif­teen min­utes early I had per­mis­sion for so that I could get to my Hebrew School class on time because “Jews were always ask­ing for spe­cial favors,” and why should I get out of singing the Christ­mas songs that every­one ought to know? In sixth grade, in my grad­u­a­tion sig­na­ture book, Jim wrote on the very first page, “Rose are red, vio­lets are blue/I never met a nicer Jew.” Evan: “To the Jew, Have a penny good time in 7^th grade.” Andy: “Of all the pushy Jews, you top them all.”

In sev­enth grade, I was accused of tru­ancy because I stayed home from school for the first two days of Suc­cot, the Fes­ti­val of Booths, a hol­i­day in the Jew­ish cal­en­dar that is as major as Passover – mean­ing that it is a hol­i­day you are not sup­posed to work or go to school on – but which very few Gen­tiles know about because it does not coin­cide with any Chris­t­ian hol­i­days and is not as eas­ily explain­able as Rosh HaShana, the New Year, or Yom Kip­pur, the Day of Atone­ment. When the atten­dance offi­cer called my house, she was sur­prised that I answered – I guess she fig­ured I would try not to be found – and when I explained to her about Suc­cot, she thought I was lying. “There are Jews at work here today,” she said. When I sug­gested to her that maybe they were not reli­gious (I was, at the time time, think­ing I might want to be a rabbi when I grew up), she told me to stop being so sneaky. “You’re all alike,” she said.

In eighth grade, I changed schools and started going to a yeshiva about twenty min­utes by car away from my house. I no longer had prob­lems with anti­semitism at school, and I can­not even begin to explain how relieved I felt not to have to explain myself all the time, but the prob­lems in my neigh­bor­hood con­tin­ued. From about ninth grade on, I was more or less con­stantly harassed in the street, called Jew, kike, heeb.I was threat­ened with being cooked in an oven, cru­ci­fied as revenge for the killing of Christ and being sac­ri­ficed to the devil because all Jews were going to hell any­way; I had beer bot­tles thrown at me, rocks the size of soft­balls. My home was robbed and my room was sin­gled out for par­tic­u­larly vicious attack. The thieves carved the word “Kike” into the door of my closet; they threw the books of Jew­ish learn­ing that I had on my shelves on the floor and walked all over them. There were entire years when I had to carry some­thing I could use as a weapon if I was going into cer­tain areas of my neigh­bor­hood, espe­cially if I was walk­ing alone, but even when I went with “friends,” because the anti­semites hung out in those areas and I had learned from expe­ri­ence that I could only rarely count on my friends to stand with me if I was assaulted or even just threat­ened with phys­i­cal assault.

These anti­semites wrote anti­se­mitic graf­fiti about me on the walls of the library. The cop who arrested the kid doing the spray paint­ing was very smart; he made sure to wait until the kid was done so that the anti­se­mitic nature of the graf­fiti was clear, and the kid could be charged with a more seri­ous crime. It took the town where I lived, how­ever, three years before they decided to try to clean the graf­fiti off the wall, and then they did such a bad job of it that, fif­teen years later, when I brought the woman who is now my wife to meet my mother for the first time, you could still read the words, “New­man is a penny Jew,” and make out the draw­ing of a penny that the artist had drawn, just in case you didn’t get the point. Six­teen more years later, actu­ally just one year ago, mak­ing it thirty one years after the graf­fiti had orig­i­nally been writ­ten, when I drove by one day with my son, I stopped to show him where I lived when I was grow­ing up, and you could still make the graf­fiti out, though I don’t know if you’d be able to read it if you didn’t already know what it said. The point is that the town never actu­ally both­ered to erase it; they waited for the ele­ments to do it.

In eleventh grade, my class went on a trip to some­where that included a tour of a ship of his­tor­i­cal impor­tance. (I don’t remem­ber which one.) We were stand­ing on the deck, when a group of much younger kids, prob­a­bly in ele­men­tary school, came on board. One of the girls asked one of the adults accom­pa­ny­ing them why the boys in my group were wear­ing those “funny hats.” The adult explained that they were called yarmulkes and it meant we were Jew­ish. “Oh,” the kid said, a tone of won­der com­pletely bereft of irony creep­ing into her voice. “Then where are their horns?” I did not hear the adult’s answer.

Finally, in twelfth grade Eng­lish class – I had switched from yeshiva back to pub­lic school – while dis­cussing Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mis­tress,” Mr. Giglio asked if any­one knew the bib­li­cal ref­er­ence in the poem’s clos­ing lines: “Thus, though we can­not make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.” I raised my hand and said it referred to Joshua mak­ing the sun stand still at the bat­tle of Gibeon. Mr. Giglio looked at the rest of the class, “You should be ashamed of your­selves! This boy who doesn’t go to church knows the bible bet­ter than you; the Bat­tle of Gibeon was in the read­ing this past Sunday!”

That same year, Joan invited me to her house for din­ner. It was a big deal for me. I didn’t have many friends in my class, and it helped a lot that she was cute. As we sat around the table after the meal, I don’t remem­ber why, but the sub­ject of the Holo­caust came up. Joan’s father said some­thing to the effect that, well, maybe a cou­ple of thou­sand Jews at most had been killed in the con­cen­tra­tion camps, but the idea that 6 mil­lion had died was just pre­pos­ter­ous. More­over, he said, the fact that so much of the world believed it was 6 mil­lion the result of some very good pro­pa­gan­diz­ing on the part of the Jews and, par­tic­u­larly, Israel. He said this in the most friendly of ways, try­ing to edu­cate my mis­guided self. To her credit, Joan argued with me against him, but I sat there feel­ing like I was being punched in the stom­ach over and over again. I wanted to throw up. I had heard about Holo­caust deniers, but I had never actu­ally met one in the flesh, and hear­ing what he said made me phys­i­cally sick. I was not invited to Joan’s house again, and what had been the begin­nings of our friend­ship stopped grow­ing right there.

If I were to con­tinue this account­ing of anti­semitism in my life and tell you about things that hap­pened to me in col­lege, in the work­ing world, in my career as a col­lege pro­fes­sor, and in my mar­riage to an Iran­ian Mus­lim woman, the exam­ples would, in gen­eral, grow less and less fre­quent, more and more sub­tle and the overt vio­lence or threat of vio­lence would com­pletely dis­ap­pear. With the excep­tion of hav­ing been advised when I was a teenager not to bother apply­ing for a job at the coun­try club near my home, since it was well-known that they did not hire Jews, I have never been denied a job because I am Jew­ish; I have never had a hard time get­ting a loan, rent­ing or buy­ing an apart­ment, or in any of the other aspects of life that are made dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble for peo­ple who are struc­turally dis­crim­i­nated against in this coun­try. I live a rel­a­tively com­fort­able life. I am not afraid when I walk down the street that some­one, because of who I am, will decide to call me out in some way or attack me out­right — though it’s also impor­tant to acknowl­edge that I live in New York City, prob­a­bly one of the safest places to be Jew­ish in the US, and that there are places in this coun­try where it would be fool­ish of me not to feel that fear at least a lit­tle bit. (I also should point out that all of the exam­ples of anti­semitism I gave above took place in a town on Long Island just over the bor­der divid­ing Queens from Nas­sau County; for all intents and pur­poses, in other words, in New York City.)

So, on the one hand, anti­semitism was a cen­tral expe­ri­ence of my grow­ing up a Jew in the United States; on the other hand, as I have grown older, it has receded in promi­nence, par­tially because of where I live and par­tially because its struc­tural man­i­fes­ta­tions have been almost, if not entirely elim­i­nated – to the point where I can some­times pre­tend it does not exist.

Except when it comes time to dis­cuss the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict and Zionism.

I have never, not even among Jews, not even among Jews with whom I pretty much agree 100%, had a dis­cus­sion about that con­flict where the ques­tion of anti­semitism has not arisen. Either someone’s cri­tique of Israel is nakedly – or not so nakedly – anti­se­mitic, or some­one who is not Jew­ish feels it nec­es­sary to instruct me when I want to point out the anti­semitism in a cri­tique of Israel or Zion­ism that not all such cri­tiques are by def­i­n­i­tion anti­se­mitic, or some­one who is Jew­ish calls anti­semitism when it isn’t there, or, among Jews, we spend time ana­lyz­ing the anti­semitism in cri­tiques of Israel, or com­plain­ing about the anti­semitism in cri­tiques of Israel, and so on and so on and so on.

Indeed, it often feels these days that the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict is the only con­text in which a dis­cus­sion anti­semitism is taken seri­ously. It gives anti­semites an oppor­tu­nity to cloak their anti­semitism in an argu­ment that has a con­sid­er­able amount of moral high ground built into it, and to call foul when Jews and our allies say, “Wait a minute! We’re not going to let you get away with anti­semitism just because the poli­cies of the Israeli gov­ern­ment deserve crit­i­cism.” More impor­tantly, I think, for Jews and our allies, pre­cisely because anti­semitism is not taken seri­ously enough as a phe­nom­e­non in and of itself, a real­ity of Jew­ish lives inde­pen­dent of what goes on between Israel and the Pales­tini­ans, and pre­cisely because sec­u­lar Zion­ism and that State of Israel were founded largely in response to anti­semitism, dis­cus­sions of the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict become one of the few oppor­tu­ni­ties we have to talk about anti­semitism period, all of it, how it has worked and con­tin­ues to work all over the world. The result is that what should be a con­ver­sa­tion about Israel and Pales­tine and the peo­ple who are liv­ing and fight­ing and dying there ends up bear­ing the bur­den of, for exam­ple, not only every instance of anti­semitism I listed above, but the his­tory out of which that anti­semitism arises and that con­tin­ues to give it con­text. No sin­gle con­ver­sa­tion should have to bear that bur­den. Anti­semitism is thou­sands of years old; mil­lions upon mil­lions of Jews have suf­fered and died, and there are places where they con­tinue to suf­fer and die, world­wide because of it. Inevitably, then, try­ing to fold into a dis­cus­sion of the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict all of the dis­cus­sion that needs to hap­pen around the fact that anti­se­mitic val­ues are still very much alive in the world, includ­ing within the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict, is going to result in the invis­i­bil­ity of the extreme suf­fer­ing the Pales­tini­ans endure daily at the hands of the Israelis, of which the recent assault on Gaza is only an extreme example.

This is the point, though I am late in the game in terms of the time­li­ness of this post, at which I want to enter the frus­trat­ing, fas­ci­nat­ing, and, at times, infu­ri­at­ing dis­cus­sion gen­er­ated by David Schraub’s guest posts on Fem­i­niste titled, “We Can­not Live With­out Our Lives” Either: Jews, Priv­i­lege, and Anti-Subordination and Anti-Semitism and Sub­or­di­na­tion Part II: The Myth of Jew­ish Hyper-Power. I am not going to recap all of the ways in which David was cri­tiqued, accu­rately or not, nor am I – at least not at first – going to address head on the points where I dis­agree with him. Rather, I want to explore the ways in which I empathize with him, because even though I dis­agree with him now quite pro­foundly, there was a time when I would have agreed with him almost absolutely and the empa­thy that would have led to that agree­ment still remains.

Final note before I move on to Part 2: There have also been a num­ber of posts at Alas in response both to David’s posts and the dis­cus­sion they have gen­er­ated that I think are impor­tant to read: Talk­ing about anti-semitism now, by Maia and Posts About Anti-Semitism Often Hit Home For Me by Man­dolin. Julie has writ­ten Why I’ve Stopped Talk­ing About Gaza, as well as Dear Non-Jewish Activists: and This is not my com­mu­nity. (Other posts on Alas that are impor­tant include Links to Israeli and Jew­ish voices oppos­ing Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Inhu­man. There are oth­ers as well.)

There is also a tan­gen­tially related post up at Fem­i­niste, “Dis­tin­guish­ing a Polit­i­cal Stance from a Racist Stance”, the dis­cus­sion of which deals with the issues raised by the com­mon use of the term anti-Semitism to mean Jew-hating, espe­cially when the term is used to describe the words or actions of Arabs, who, obvi­ously, are Semitic (far more so than I am, for exam­ple). Indeed, the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion asked by the Arab author of the paper to which this post refers is, “How can we, as Semi­tes, be anti-Semitic?” Julie’s com­ment, I think, does a fine job of cri­tiquing that ques­tion and how it is often used, so I am not going to repeat it here. My point in rais­ing the whole ques­tion of the term anti-Semitism is to explain why I write it the way I do: antisemitism.

I wish I could remem­ber the book where I first encoun­tered this tac­tic so I could quote for you accu­rately the orig­i­nal ratio­nale behind it, but I can’t. I have been writ­ing the term this way ever since I read that book, how­ever, because it allows me to con­tinue using the word in com­mon usage for Jew-hating while at the same time draw­ing atten­tion away – how­ever slightly – from the fact that in its orig­i­nal form it referred to Semitic peo­ple, and even then, it did so inac­cu­rately. When Wil­helm Marr pop­u­lar­ized the term in 1879 so that Jew-hating would have a sci­en­tific and there­fore objec­tively, legit­imiz­ing word that could be used to refer to it, he obvi­ously did not even con­sider the Arabs wor­thy of notice. The term, in other words, has a dou­ble oppres­sion embed­ded in it, and it would be much bet­ter if we could find a dif­fer­ent word, espe­cially since dis­cus­sions of the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict, the sit­u­a­tion of Jews in the Arab world and so on inevitably involve ques­tions of Arab anti­semitism. Anti­semitism, how­ever, is the word that we have. “Jew-hating” is dif­fi­cult, I think, because the word “hat­ing” inher­ently raises the stakes and implies that all expres­sions and man­i­fes­ta­tions of anti­semitism exist at the same level of inten­sity and harm­ful­ness and so it removes, for me any­way, the feel­ing that nuance is pos­si­ble in these dis­cus­sions. “Ori­en­tal­ism,” which is men­tioned in a quote in one of Julie’s com­ments might be a term that encom­passes as April Rosen­blum – the per­son Julie quotes – says, “a larger oppres­sion that both groups [Arabs and Jews] expe­ri­ence,” but it would take quite a bit of work, I think, to make that term really use­ful in describ­ing the oppres­sion of Euro­pean Jews who are so clearly not “Ori­en­tal,” even though I would agree they were “ori­en­tal­ized” as part of their oppres­sion; and since I do not want this series of posts to have to do that work, I am going to stick with the term that we have, though in a form that is, I hope, alien­ated enough from itself that peo­ple will be will­ing to accept it as the word that refers to the (usu­ally racial­ized) hatred of the Jews.